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Trace William Cowen was founded in Los Angeles. He tweets here with dramatic impropriety.
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A video that falsely promotes a cure for COVID-19, among others, has been removed from various social media platforms. Unsurprisingly, the president of the United States was among those who had amplified the video’s exposure, even though he all shared “several versions” of it with his Twitter fans on Monday night.
The video was released through the far-right Breitbart medium, via CNN, and focuses on an organization of other people dressed in lab coats that in turn are “America’s top-line doctors.” A “Dr. Simone Gold,” who has appeared among Fox News visitors in the afterlife and is known for having a percentage of anti-scientific perspectives on virus containment efforts, is credited to a related site as the organization’s leader.
The claims recklessly presented in the video come with references to hydroxychloroquine as a “cure” for the virus, the FDA in the past has decided that this is not an effective treatment, as well as harmful anti-masking messages. In particular, the content of the video doesn’t even fit the Trump administration’s own fitness experts.
Social media platforms, which added Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, worked temporarily to counter the broadcast of the video Monday night. In a statement, a Twitter representative, who had made similar clips retweeted through Trump inaccessible until Tuesday morning, said his team “acted” as a component of a corporate policy on COVID-19 misinformation. Representatives from Facebook and YouTube shared similar statements.
Later Tuesday, Trump Jr., who also shared the video in question, saw some of the features of his account “temporarily limited” by violating site regulations related to the spread of “misleading and potentially destructive information” regarding the virus:
Current CDC figures show that the number of virus deaths shown in the United States is around 150,000 as of July 27. But Trump and those like him seem smart to sell you offensively stupid like this that will only exacerbate an already grueling fitness crisis.
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